Putting Her Best Foot Forward

The Diabetic’s Girlfriend, Ashley Hanger, is on track to fundraise $10k for Diabetes Australia while she starts a new platform for people with diabetes

- Ellie Griffiths

For the first two years, I think I was really ignorant to how diabetes affects Tristan’s life,” says 26-year-old Ash, whose partner of four years has type 1. “He’s very happy-go-lucky and doesn’t talk about it if he’s had a bad night sleep, or if he’s feeling drained. But because he never made it seem like a big deal, I mirrored his attitude, without really understanding what he was going through.” Although there were moments when Tristan, 29, would ask Ash to grab him a Coke when he felt his sugars drop, she’d only ever had passing interactions with people with diabetes, so she didn’t know what living with diabetes meant.

However, when they moved in together in 2019, the mirror was shattered. “We woke up one morning, and Tristan wasn’t getting out of bed,” she recalls. “I thought he was just tired, so I left him to sleep while I got ready for work. When he finally got out of bed, he was doing bizarre things - like opening doors and cupboards, walking in circles, and speaking in incoherent sentences - and then he couldn’t even hold himself up.

“Initially, I thought he was kidding around - if you knew us, you’d understand - but it dawned on me pretty quickly that something was very, very wrong... and I had no idea how to fix it.

“Back then, I didn’t know the difference between a low or a high, or how to treat either one; but in my head giving him a soft drink was the easiest thing I could do, so I gave him a Lucozade and hoped for the best.